Robert Glasper Quotes

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.

Many of the former Slaves are only nominally free, for the servile spirit is still within them.

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class. We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life. The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.

… it would be perfectly right for anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage.

It has always been a great wrong that these men and their families should be held in bondage.

I sedulously refrained from doing anything that would incite slaves to run away from their masters.

The topic of slavery is like an electric fence. Touch it and people will react.

It's sort of what the Johnny and Devi stories are about, the idea of always being a slave to something.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.

Several hundred years ago, the only thing that slave families had was cooking and their family meals.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

I rejoice that, in the first attempt of the slave-hunters to convert our jail into a slave-pen and our citizens into slave-catchers, they have signally failed, and that it has been decided by the spontaneous uprising and sovereign voice of the people, that no human being can be dragged into bondage from Milwaukee.

Prior to the Revolution, the great majority, or rather the great body of our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them ever doubted the propriety and rectitude of it.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom on those who are not free.

On this subject [slavery] I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.

Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

I should sooner remain in Southern bondage than avail myself of the opportunity of Northern freedom.

Every slave is a stolen man.

Peace was restored between America and Great Britain which diffused universal joy among all parties except us, who had escaped slavery and taken refuge in the English army; for a report prevailed at New York that all the slaves … were to be delivered up to their masters although some of them had been 3 or 4 years amongst the British. This dreadful rumor filled us with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters … seizing upon slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.

Several of Providence Merchant John Brown’s slaves ran away to Boston. About a year later they showed up and asked to be taken in again. It says something about how hard it was to be a free Black at that time